1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a reaction cell and, more specifically, to a reaction cell in which a biochemical reaction, such as an enzyme reaction or nucleic acid hybridization, proceeds, and a method of using the reaction cell to carry out and observe chemical reactions.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, detecting a degree of a reaction or identifying a characteristic of a sample, the nature of which is unknown, is achieved by receiving the sample into a reaction cell and, after the passage of a prescribed reaction length of time, carrying out calorimetric analyses or the like.
Hybridization between complementary nucleic acid strands is an effective method for detecting and identifying genetic materials. The hybridization reaction is a chemical technique wherein two nucleic-acid strands having complementary bases, such as the strands forming molecules of DNA, are bonded to each other to thereby form a double-stranded material. For performing an analysis of hybridized nucleic acid strands, one of the nucleic acid strands is labeled with, for example, a fluorescent material or tag before hybridization with its complementary nucleic acid strand. After hybridization is complete, the amount of labeled material present in the double-stranded material is detected in order to thereby measure the hybridized amount of material in the sample. Namely, the hybridization method is used for the estimation of abase sequence of an unknown nucleic acid material by means of detecting whether it has hybridized with its complementary counterpart. Detection of whether an unknown target genetic material is present in a sample occurs when a known base sequence of one nucleic acid strand contacts a complementary base sequence from the sample, which results in the two complementary nucleic acid strands being hybridized. The hybridized nucleic acid strands are then detected and quantified.
There are cases with various kinds of enzyme reactions, not limited to the above-described nucleic acid hybridization, where merely putting a relevant solution into the reaction cell results in a failure for the reaction to proceed with a high efficiency. For this reason, it is considered as being effective to vibrate and agitate the solution within the reaction cell by using a vibrator or an ultrasonic oscillator.